Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Mistaken Indemnities

paragraph 1

If “all poetry is mourning” — a replica of sorrow that we can manage [1] — perhaps Charles Bernstein may not attend that funeral, if the notion of poetry as “comforting” offends his office of poetry [2]. Although I agree with Juliana Spahr who has said poetry helps her think [3], since it helps me think, too, and with Bernstein and others for positing poetry as a possible alternative to deception — I no more want to champion feeling as thought’s backwards cousin, than I want to deny (at least not too often) my need for occasional, even frequent, comforting.

2

Poetry as entryway to suppressed or undiscovered thoughts/feelings; poets may feel (think) their poems accommodate complex thoughts / feelings better than relatively simplistic (if not deceptive) quasi-linear prose. (Writing in order to get rid of memory / Forget in order to remember and then forget what we’ve remembered [4].) Who cares if our memories or poems are material, physiological, metaphysical, psychological, fake or real? As somebody said about John Waters’ films [5], the more fake, the more real. Let’s go for “the painfully impossible in the human heart” [6] [brain].

3

Reginald Shepard and others have championed the poem as experience versus as representation of experience. Shepard has commented he cannot claim to understand poems that have nonetheless changed him in important ways [7]. Today Sylvia Plath would not be ridiculed for “appropriating” the Holocaust any more than I was for appropriating Plath’s lines in collage poems:

4

They collapse like lungs, the escaped water
On the blank stones of the landing
Nailed to the rafters yesterday
Moldering heads console me
Soon each white lady will be boarded up
.
.
.

That big blue head
In the waters off beautiful Nauset
In his cage of ether, his cage of stars
In a sort of cement well
Papery feeling
Black bat airs
And hands like nervous butterflies
I have hung our cave with roses
There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me
A crocodile of small girls
That life was a mere monumental sham
What holes this papery day is already full of
Surely the sky is not that color

Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge
such poverty assaults the ego; caught compels a total sacrifice
dragging trees
She is used to this sort of thing
a million ignorants
How the sun polishes this shoulder!
Now I have lost myself .... am sick of baggage
The tulips are too red ... they hurt me
How in such mild air [8]

5

The avant-garde has been said to “undermine all certainties, including the certainty that you possess the truth — and are entitled to kill people in its name” [9]. Yet Spahr warns against viewing the lyric as the backwoods relative of the non-lyric: “romantic in the derisive sense” [10]. richard lopez says: “poems, poetry, and poets are sort of an antidote against hate-mongering and thinned-down ideas that give rise to feelings of being absolutely right “ [11]. Experimental poetry has often been linked to political liberalism / anti-patriarchy. Does it follow that more conventional poetry is philosophically tied to the political right? Or to how tightly one holds on to one’s beliefs: an absolutist v. relativistic thang. God save me (although he may not, perhaps the Goddess will) from the rigid liberals. The poetry of the future admits all sinners, indistinguishable from saints. Gary Sullivan said the multicultural movement — not mere identity politics — has helped create a radical shift in how we look at/ read writing, with more attention to context [12]. I want to think so.

6

Yet....even if sometimes true ? how often do we look closely at context outside of writing?

7

“If writing is lying, nothing is true, / and pressure is on the mind, not eye...” [13]

8

. . . I had, if recently, come to avoid using the royal we — as in “we’re bombing Iraq again” — [14], yet, pressured to write a paper for a booklet about gender equity and linguistics where i was the only non-Japanese contributor, i resorted to the royal we (we in Japan, we at aichi university of education, we educators, we Japanese, etc.) to alleviate the anticipated dismissal of my “foreign” views.

9

Whereas I’d like to have written more directly about my own experiences of sexual harassment and racial stereotyping, I had an inkling that was not what was wanted.

10

I am with you
I don’t understand you
Therefore I understand that you are
Therefore I understand that I am
The sorrow that I do not understand you
The sorrow that you are what you are [15]

11

I worry about what is outside my mind. I worry about what is inside... about “nihilist thoughts in the brain of God” [16]...or being a madwoman, a victim of the rebellion of words [17]....The principal task is to dissolve the fermentations which, having formed in the body, give rise to madness [18]. Where do the fermentations come from, are they growing now?

12

Alice Notley has written:

13

The sons-of-bitches in Washington and Wall Street and
L.A. are still sons and rich ones — admitting a few
exactly like-minded bitches — and worse, self-perpetuatingly
powerful in the tiny glassed-in bubble that contains
all the controls [19].

14

Yet:

15

. . . what if the poem actually is
the cause of our confusions, not outlet
or even inlay [20]

Maybe I’ll look to the critics. i want to know what bad poetry is. So i can write some....

20

Like the actress the poet who appropriates may be unclear as to who she really is, whether she was really ever anyone, whether that matters, whether anything matters:

21

To be copied the copied thorn all but the copy picture blotted out [22]

22

Although I agree with Ayukawa Nobuo [23], accused of nihilism (Pessimists, too, are often seen smiling / because they know they’re right [24] ), who reportedly believed that appropriation was fine, if coinciding with authentic feelings/ thoughts/ beliefs of the appropriator, and with Park Kyong-Mi, who notes that “words that we call words all belong to others” as we “place [our] own self atop the words of someone else” [25]:

23

A single bird sang
but not her own song
a different song sang from her throat
her song a different song
the bird didn’t recognize
didn’t know it was a different song
a different someone speaking from her throat [26]

24

I embraced collectivism, then individualism, then hedonism, then relativism . . . .

25

Yet a relativist can lose her drive or direction when cultural values she no longer holds previously propelled her into action. For the poet what is left is “the wound and the cure of words” [27]. But it’s only a temporary balm. A fleeting frenzy.

According to Willard Spiegelman [29], John Ashbery surrounds himself with lots of nature in his poems to stave off loneliness. Yet maybe he is just an ordinary shopper. The cover of the Colorado Review Summer 2005 features a desolate broken landscape that reflects my life in spring 2008 in central Japan, in which Australian poet John Kinsella is also lost [30]. Colorado Review Summer 2004 has a dark cloud on the cover and two solitary trees, well two trees can’t be all that solitary, unless they are fighting or hate each other. Within poet John Kryah (almost everyone named in this paragraph so far is a John, and i am obviously a prostitute) in “Perforate” writes: “What hems in around them is the air.” [31] Even nature confines us like an ill-fitting bra, or every item of clothing i have purchased in Japan since 1989. I may as well don traditional kimono and a black wig, and have eye surgery.

Many may suffer personality changes because of poetry, and become
quite irritable and easy to anger. The person who “wakes up” after poetry often loses the ability to express herself in any other fashion, thus becomes embarrassed when unable to carry on a conversation, get a haircut, or receive the proper item at the supermarket. As a result, many poets self-isolate. Friends, family, and co-workers who see the same external person may not understand why the poet believes she is so different.

32

The lost object is the poet’s former self. Obviously, depression becomes a big problem. She will write more poems to retrieve the lost object, and will fail repeatedly, tho succeed momentarily.

33

The Transformation by Juliana Spahr is a story of “how they became aware of not being a part of us or we, in the sense of accusation, whether they wanted to be a they or not . . . about realizing they cannot shrug off this they ....” [34]

34

As a they myself, I realized I could perhaps become a we again by moving back to the US, but, I’m not sure i can be a we there anymore, and not sure i ever was a we there in fact. And do i want to be we even if i could...:

35

“You wanted the moment to pass, / but when it did, you wanted it back again.” [35]

36

In fact (as if sure) however like Kyoko Mori I feel most part of things (or most authentic) when bathed in anonymity, mostly invisible like in an urban coffee shop surrounded by strangers [36]. Or in a forest hemmed in by trees.

He doesn’t appear to be looking at me
He doesn’t appear to be able to smell anything
Despite his pretty face

39

Don’t you see that what I need now more than poetry is affection
I said in my heart
In the universe not even a sliver of affection exists
That’s why the stars look so pretty [38]

40

In a soil of pavement, a mesh of wires . . . / In the
new winter among enormous buildings [39]

41

I’m heading toward a town I’ll never visit in order
to spend time with people whom I’ll never meet [40]

42

What to make of the pastoral even where it’s apparent
hills are covered with tank tracks, where sheep contrive
to make this landscape hegemonic green and white,
connecting the dots into a tender portrait apart from
any pre-war sense of these fields; what will have been
shadowed by violence is still an open space, grief
mortgaged to later chaos. You cried yesterdayover the lost child; do not cry again[41]

43

I walk among enormous words in tiny boots.

44

Each word mobilizes another. Yet true meaning resides in ads for Botox. It is better to exist in a poem, or appear to. History is a fiction haunted by language. Poems terrorize meaning, governments terrorize everyone.

45

Being comes before poetry, only by accident, only sometimes. That’s probably a fiction.

46

Illusions are comforting. Poetry is comforting to the extent it supports what you already think and feel, or to the extent it helps you forget what you thought or felt, temporarily replacing old ideas and feelings with new ones to momentarily relieve your boredom or despair.

47

Poetry becomes habit. On second thought, on third thought, on fourth thought....

Notes

. . . in the wake of September 11, I felt a continued
commitment to poetry, to poetics and indeed to teaching.
If anything, 9/11 made me feel an intensified sense
of the relevance of the office of poetry. Not the
demeaning
sense of poetry as 'comforting' in a time
of crisis . . . I mean poetry as a way of thinking in, around,
and through 'the real,' and in particular, a way of going
beyond the deafeningly deceptive representations of
'reality' provided by the massed media.

in: A poetics of impasse in modern and contemporary American poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; by Susan Schultz, 2005, p. 211

[3] See Juliana Spahr, p. 131 in Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, American poets in the 21st century (Wesleyan UP, 2007).

[4] from Hank Forest's Party by Ascher/Straus, appearing in The New Review of Literature, Vol 5 No 2 Spring 2008.

[5] If I knew who said this, I would tell you. I heard it in a documentary about Waters aired on Japanese tv some time ago; I was channel-surfing — it may have been an American program from the Biography channel / Discovery channel about Waters.

[37] From an excerpt of Time of Sky by Kawata Ayane, English translation on p. 9 of Three Factorial.

[38] From the poem Panjii (Pansy) by Tanikawa Shuntaro (Japan’s most famous poet) in English translation in Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Leith Morton, 2004, University of Hawaii Press, p. 176). I've masculinized the pronouns of the original. Morton also reports Tanikawa’s comments from a 1997 interview when he stated he felt the practice of poetry was bad for him, a kind of disease from which to flee, at a time he decided to go on hiatus from poetry writing after a very successful 40 year career (see pages159—161 of Morton).

[40] From the poem a mamaist vehicle in mamaist: learning a new language by Alan Botsford Saitoh, 2002, Minato No Hito.

[41] From And Then Something Happened, p. 125, by Susan Schultz, Salt, 2004.

[42] The preceding paragraphs are currently part of a long poem-like work in progress by me under the title OP / US.

[43] I became increasingly attracted to Whitman's work after moving to Japan. The poems referred to are ones I teach early in my undergrad introductory course in American poetry at a university of education in central Japan. Anjo is the name of the small city in which I live.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Originally from the U.S.A., poet and activist Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is now based in central Japan. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in the international small presses. Her first poetry book, Skin Museum, was published in 2006; her second poetry collection, Aquiline, in the northern Fall of 2007, and her third book of poetry is titled Exhibit C (forthcoming in 2008 from Ahadada Books). She works as an associate professor at a Japanese national university of education, where she teaches courses in American poetry, pedagogy, gender, and intercultural studies. Email is welcome at <janenakagawa[ât]yahoo.com>.